Ted Chiang: Story of our life

Contains spoilers

This was a great novella. A slow burner, it drops its core themes quickly and densely about three quarters of the way through. Language, time, free-will, purpose, parenting are all front and center in this very human human-alien encounter. I love stories that focus on that slippery line between what we have the ability to change and what we don’t and how we make sense of this partial self-determination.

I love this excerpt. The narrator is a mom, learning what it is to raise a child. The last sentence alludes to some of the lessons learned as a parent.

That day, when Gary first explained Fermat’s principle to me, he had mentioned that almost every physical law could be stated as a variational principle. Yet when humans thought about physical laws they prefered to work with them in their causal formulation. I could understand that. The physical attributes that humans found intuitive, like kinetic energy or acceleration were all properties of an object at a given moment of time. And these were conducive to a chronological, causal interpretation of events - one moment growing out of another - causes and effects creating a chain reaction that grew from past to future. In contrast, the physical attributes that the heptopods found intuitive like action or those other things defined by integrals were meaningful only over a period of time. And these were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events. By viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing, and one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal. One needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated. I was growing to understand that too.

It introduced me to the word teleology, the idea that the passing of events can be attributed to their outcomes rather than an earlier cause¹. It’s the philosophical version of Everything Happens for a Reason (EHFR). The academic version is apparently not very in vogue at the moment, but the popular culture version sure seems to be.

Scientists and philosophers don’t like it because it doesn’t fit into a testable framework. There’s no way to run an experiment in which your intervention (the thing you want to study) happens after the outcome.